"Black letter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Shakespearian criticism that had yet appeared, and the text was based upon a most searching collation of all the Folios and of all the Quartos known to exist at that time. Capell's own conjectures, not always very happy, which he has introduced into his text, are distinguished by being printed in black letter. ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... malignant She-Monkey, a great Delinquent, and has a comical woodcut upon the title page of the animal, in a cap and petticoat and with a sword by its side. This pamphlet is printed partly in ordinary modern type and partly in black letter. Another pamphlet in the form of dialogue is directed against the abuses of the laws, especially at one of the infamous 'comptoirs' of the time. It is called Wonderfull Strange Newes from Wood Street Countor—yet not ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... who had been shut up all their lives in their studies, poking their noses into saucepans full of cookeries, which did not resemble savory soups or well-flavored ragouts, wearing their eyes out with reading books printed in the crabbedest black letter possible, and shrivelling up their brains with thinking, until they quite rattled inside their skulls, all ...
— Funny Big Socks - Being the Fifth Book of the Series • Sarah L. Barrow
... Caxton's residence at Westminster he printed at least thirty books. In 1479 he recast type 2 (cited in its new form by Blades as type 2*), and this he continued to use until 1481. But about the same time he cast two other founts, Nos. 3 and 4. The first of these was a large black letter of Missal character, used chiefly for printing service books, but appearing in the books printed with type 2* for headlines. With it he printed Cordyale, or the Four Last Things, a folio of 78 leaves, ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... of Curious Books; containing numerous Works on the Occult Sciences, America, Asia, Books of Prints, curious Quarto Tracts, English Black Letter, Early Printed Works, Proverbs, Facetiae, &c. &c. May be had on application, or by forwarding ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various
... old chancel, and above those arches there were some paintings. They came to light when the Old Church was pulled down. First, a great deal of plaster and whitewash came off. Then appeared part of the Commandments in Old English black letter, and below that, again, were some paintings, traced out in red upon the wall. They have been defaced so much that all that could be found out was that there was a quatrefoil shape within a square. The corners were filled up apparently with the emblems of the Four Cherubim, though only ...
— Old Times at Otterbourne • Charlotte M. Yonge
... demanded his adversary. 'Sir, and your honors,' said Wirt, straightening himself up to his full height, 'I am not bound to grope my way among the ruins of antiquity, to stumble over obsolete statutes, or delve in black letter law, in search of a principle written in living letters upon the heart of every man.' If the idea contained in this answer of Wirt, were more fully appreciated by our modern jurists, it would be all the better for ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... assiduous study of the law was next to invigorate and quicken it. In conversation with his brother he remarked, "that Blackstone's Commentaries would have saved him seven years' labor pouring over and delving in black letter." He appears to have formed a very correct judgment respecting the nature of professional education and the best means of mastering its abstruse details. He constantly inculcated upon the young men who came to study in his ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... Acute Pen of the Excellent and Renowned Dr. Horneck. I shall only single out a few of the more Memorable passages therein Occurring; and where it agrees with what happened among ourselves, my Reader shall understand, by my inserting a Word of every such thing in Black Letter. ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... herself. Mrs. Grainger with her charities, Mrs. Littleton Pryor with her good works, Miss Godfrey with her virtue—all swallowed it as gracefully as possible. Noblesse oblige. Honora had read French and English memoirs, and knew that history repeats itself. And a biography that is printed in black letter and illuminated in gold is attractive in spite of its contents. The contents, indeed, our heroine had not found uninteresting, and she turned now to the subject with a flutter ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Shane O'Neill. The first State Paper notice of this enterprise is in a letter, dated February, 8, 1572, from Captain Piers to the Lord Deputy, stating that the country is in an uproar "at Mr. Smith coming over to plant in the north." There is a rare black letter still extant, entitled, ["Letter by F.B. on the Peopling of the Ardes"] which Smith wrote to induce English adventurers to join him in his speculation. It is composed with considerable ability. He condemns severely the degeneracy of the early English ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... that only an auctioneer admires all schools of literature. I think it is certain that the way to get most enjoyment from books is to specialise a little. Mr. Pepys, it will be remembered, collected Black Letter Ballads, Penny Merriments, Penny Witticisms, Penny Compliments, and Penny Godlinesses, and what Pepys paid a penny for are now worth much gold. Lord Crawford is, I believe, one of the most enthusiastic among present day ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... in a fine but very peculiar handwriting, which was hard to read: it was just like black letter. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... fifteen years. The last mass burning in Germany was said to have taken place in 1678, when 97 persons were burned together. The earliest recorded burning of a witch in England is in Walter Mapes' De Nugis Curialium, in the reign of Henry II. An old black letter tract gloats over the execution at Northampton, 1612, of a number of persons convicted of witchcraft.[32] The last judicial sentence was in 1736, when one Jane Wenham was found guilty of conversing familiarly with the devil in the ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... ballads, old plays, and old women's stories, are at present in as much request as old wine or new speeches. In fact, this is the millennium of black letter: thanks to ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... before he overtook me, my eye rested an instant only on the long-lost Benjamin, clean and unspotted. I instantly closed the parcel (which was described in the Catalogue as Lot '531 Psalmes, other editions, 1630 to 1675 black letter, a parcel') and tightened the string just as Alfred came to lay it on the table. A cool-blooded coolness seized me, and advancing to the table behind Mr. Lilly I quietly bid, in a perfectly natural tone, 'Sixpence,' and so ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... and true of hainous and horrible acts committed by Elizabeth Stile, etc. (for full title see appendix). This pamphlet is in black letter. Its account is confirmed by the reference in Acts P. C., n. s., XI, 22. See also Scot, ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... that watches over us collectors made me take up the thing, which I found to be nothing less than a copy of old Guillaume Coquillart. It was not Galliot du Pre's edition, in lettres rondes, but, still more precious had it only been complete, an example in black letter. I give you the whole title. First the motto, in the frieze of an architectural design, [Greek text]. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... succeeded by three gradually diminishing specimens of the printer's roman letter. Then, four lines of Greek, in the Jensonian or Venetian character: next, in large black letter, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... the whole statute-book several times, and I believe are absolutely of opinion that the Parliament is doing nothing. The most lynx-eyed investigator of old enactments could not find one which has escaped them, for the villains are perfectly black letter in that respect; and what is in proper keeping wid this, whenever they hear of a new Act of Parliament they cannot rest either night or day until they break it. And now for the inference: be on your guard against this pandemonial squad. Whatever your ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... chace, Mid twinkling insult on Heaven's darken'd face, Like a conven'd conspiracy of spies Wink at each other with confiding eyes! Turn from the portent—all is blank on high, 5 No constellations alphabet the sky: The Heavens one large Black Letter only shew, And as a child beneath its master's blow Shrills out at once its task and its affright—[486:4] The groaning world now learns to read aright, 10 And with its Voice of Voices cries ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... three equal vertical bands of red (hoist side), yellow, and green; uses the popular pan-African colors of Ethiopia; similar to the flag of Rwanda, which has a large black letter R centered in the ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... who wrote the title of this book at the top of the page, on the other side—left hand—in the black letter, was the identical Miss Sophia Streatfield, mentioned in 'Thraliana,' as pupil to poor dear Doctor Collier, after he and I had parted. By the chance meeting of some of the currents which keep this ocean of human life from stagnating, this lady and myself were driven together ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... barbarous middle ages, that Which is most barbarous is the middle age Of man; it is—I really scarce know what; But when we hover between fool and sage, And don't know justly what we would be at— A period something like a printed page, Black letter upon foolscap, while our hair Grows grizzled, and we ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... notes or mottoes in manuscript, and is even conjectured to be the actual token by which Essex might have saved his forfeit life, if it had been delivered to the queen. The title-page represents a triumphal arch, and has these words in black letter: "C. Certeine, Prayers and Godly Meditacyions very nedefull for every Christien." The imprint is: "Emprinted at Marlboro, the yere of our Lord a Mcccccxxxviii, per me Joanis Philoparion." The volume is in good preservation, bound in velvet, with the royal arms ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 492 - Vol. 17, No. 492. Saturday, June 4, 1831 • Various
... have just issued a reprint of a black letter tract, entitled "A manifest Detection of the most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice Play," which exhibits a curious picture of the tricks in vogue amongst the gamesters of the sixteenth century, and, as the Editor very ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 20, March 16, 1850 • Various
... friend and preceptor of Charlemagne. This was the parent of the Roman alphabet, in which our books are now printed. Among other deteriorations, there crept in, in the fourteenth century, the Gothic or black letter character, and these barbarous forms are still essentially retained by the Teutonic nations though discarded by the English and Latin races; but from its superior excellences the Roman alphabet is constantly ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... something better, and a third cut about 1482; one of Double Pica, good, which first appears 1490; and one of Long Primer, at least nearly agreeing with the bodies which have since been called by those names. All of Caxton's works were printed in what are called black letter. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... sunbeams were searching out all the beauty there was in the land, and winning it into view. It was one of those illuminated hours, that are to the common day as an old painted and jewelled missal to an ordinary black letter. ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... Tower of London. That the Commissioners did their work we know from their account for the same, which came to L40. In the reformed prayer-book, however, Richard's name has been allowed to stand among the black letter saints. ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... miscellaneous, but yet in some points valuable collection of old vellum manuscripts was left, at the beginning of the present century, by a poor peripatetic Scottish tailor, who could not read one word of the old black letter documents which he spent his life and his purse in collecting. Being a visionary claimant to one of the dormant Scottish peerages, he buoyed himself up with the bright hope that some clever lawyer would yet find undoubted proofs of his claims in some of the written parchments ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... the author, begged he would at least suggest a motto from the Tale of Flodden Field. Scott opened the book at the death-scene of the hero, and his eye was immediately caught by the "inscription" in black letter:— ...
— Marmion • Sir Walter Scott
... publications of the Palaeographical Society (p. 184); but I nowhere find the proofs that the Naskhi character (vol. i. 128) so long preceded the Cufic which, amongst vulgar Moslems, is looked upon like black letter in Europe. But Semitic epigraphy is only now entering upon its second stage of study, the first being mere tentative ignorance: about 80 years ago the illustrious De Sacy proved, in a learned memoir, the non-existence of letters in Arabia before the days of Mohammed. But Palmer[FN454], Halevy, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... we find him in London, beginning his career as a man of letters. His first separate publication seems to have been the small quarto in black letter from which a quotation has just been made. This composition, named an "Anatomy" in imitation of several then recent popular treatises of a similar title, is only to be pardoned on the supposition that it was a boyish manuscript prepared at college. It is vilely written, in ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... the dog's ears of the great bible ... in the black letter in which our bibles are printed.'—'Memoirs of a Parish Clerk,' Pope's ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... venture to point out the entire unsuitableness, in their judgment, of works in learned languages, on abstruse subjects or in black letter, to the objects ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... finished, I should at last rejoin my parents in India; and I was fond of describing all the beautiful things I would send as presents to the friends who had been kind to me in England. And then one fearful day came the black letter bearing the terrible news which bowed my head in the dust, scattered my girlish vanities, and altered my fate for life. Every one in the house learned the news before me. I saw blank faces all around, and ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... the publisher was not only there, but there with his coat off, inordinately busy, bawling orders—evidently meant for a printing room—through a speaking tube. "Yes," he was shouting, "put WHISKY in black letter capitals, old English, double size, set it up to look attractive, with the legend MADE IN TORONTO in long clear ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... the commercial world as has it not in its power to expend large amounts on individual purchases, naturally seeks to make the most. It was almost amusing, some time since, to note the entries in some of the booksellers' lists under "Black Letter," "Gothic Letter," "Rare Law," "Curious Early English," and so forth; and the names of Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and other ancient printers were freely introduced to help off a rather lame foreigner, who was alleged to have been professionally associated with one or the other of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his return from that voyage, when Queen Bess did gallantly wave her jewelled hand to him from a window of Greenwich Palace, as his bold ship sailed down the Thames; "when Sir Martin returned from ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... existing spire steeple was found to be not sufficiently capacious. The tenor bell, said to have been the third bell, at Burscough, bears some apparent proof of its translation. Round the circle, below the ear, is the following inscription in black letter, except the initials ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... purses were soon on his track, and the pursuit had to be abandoned, but not till many treasures had been garnered. Last of all he became a book-hunter, beginning with little volumes of poetry and the drama from 1590 to 1610; and as time went on the boundaries expanded, but never so as to include black letter. ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... delectable history of Reynard the Fox. Newly corrected and purged, from all grossness in phrase and matter. London, by T.Ilive, for Edward Brewster, 1701. 4to, black letter. ...
— The Library of William Congreve • John C. Hodges
... Pope asserts 'The troublesome Raigne of King John,' in two parts, 1611, to have been written by Shakespeare and Rowley: which edition is a mere copy of another in black letter, 1591. But I find his assertion is somewhat to be doubted: for the old edition hath no name of author at all; and that of 1611, the initials only, W. Sh., in the ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... gained some skill in illumination, or limning as he preferred to call it, always choosing the obscurer word as the obscurer arts. First he set himself to the sever practice of the text; he spent many hours and days of toil in struggling to fashion the serried columns of black letter, writing and rewriting till he could shape the massive character with firm true hand. He cut his quills with the patience of a monk in the scriptorium, shaving and altering the nib, lightening and increasing the pressure and flexibility of the points, till the pen satisfied ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... cristen glouben die gensit mers sint die doch || nit gar vnsern glouben hand. Jtem von menigerlei Jueden glouben vnd || wie vil cristen land sint vnd doch nicht vnsern glouben haltend noch re | || chte cristen sind. Folio; black letter. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... interesting and engaging persons that Albinia had ever met, and she listened earnestly to her artless history, and pretty enthusiasms, and the story which she could not tell without tears, of her father's care, when the reward of her good behaviour had been the reading one verse in the quaint black letter ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would enable me to substantiate the present charge with a variety of facts one tenth of which would of themselves exhaust the time allotted to me. Every critic, who has or has not made a collection of black letter books—in itself a useful and respectable amusement,—puts on the seven-league boots of self-opinion, and strides at once from an illustrator into a supreme judge, and blind and deaf, fills his three-ounce ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... taught to read English by Dame Oliver[139], a widow, who kept a school for young children in Lichfield. He told me she could read the black letter, and asked him to borrow for her, from his father, a bible in that character. When he was going to Oxford, she came to take leave of him, brought him, in the simplicity of her kindness, a present of gingerbread, and said, he was the best scholar she ever had. He delighted ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... unknown to English readers. Latinism, like every new craze, became a passion, and ran through the less intelligent kinds of writing in a wild excess. Not much of the literature of this time remains in common knowledge, and for examples of these affectations one must turn over the black letter pages of forgotten books. There high-sounding and familiar words are handled and bandied about with delight, and you can see in volume after volume these minor and forgotten authors gloating over the new found treasure ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... four editions of this Romance:—to which I suspect fourscore more might be added. The first is printed at Paris for Bonfons, in double columns, black letter, with rude wood-cuts. A fine copy: from the Colbert Collection. The second edition is of the date of 1586: in long lines, roman letter, approaching the ballad-style of printing. The third edition is "A Troyes, Chez Nicolas Oudot, &c. 1634." 4to. in double ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... notices Cock Lorelles Bote, which he describes to be a satire in verse, in which the author enumerates all the most common trades and callings then in being. It was printed, in black letter, Wynken de Worde, 4to. without date. History of Printing ii. 224, and Percy's Reliques, i. ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... while birdes' songs do ripple in the aire, it is good roaming or resting in such a country, among old castles, towers, and hamlets quaint and grey. To him who can think and feel, it is like the reading of marvellously pleasant old books, some in Elizabethan type, some in earlier black letter, and hearing as we read sweet music and far-distant chimes. And apropos of this, I would remark that while I was at Princeton an idea fixed itself so firmly in my mind that to this day I live on it and act on it. It is ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... preserved, and now in my possession, are a goodly portion of one of the most rare books from the press of Wynkyn de Worde, Caxton's successor. The title is a curious woodcut with the words "Gesta Romanorum" engraved in an odd-shaped black letter. It has also numerous rude wood-cuts throughout. It was from this very work that Shakespeare in all probability derived the story of the three caskets which in "The Merchant of Venice" forms so integral a portion of the ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... perhaps you bear in mind that design called 'The Elector,' in which the Prince, emerging from his palace gate, with a cloud of courtiers behind, is met by a poor woman, her little child by the hand, appealing to his compassion, despising whom, he turns away with a serene disdain. Beneath, in black letter, is inscribed the text 'Princeps induetur maerore et quiescere faciam superbiam potentium'—and gigantic Death lays his fingers on ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Albrecht Duerer could have given unto them on copperplate or canvas. The body of the stove itself was divided into panels, which had the Ages of Man painted on them in polychrome; the borders of the panels had roses and holly and laurel and other foliage, and German mottoes in black letter of odd Old-World moralizing, such as the old Teutons, and the Dutch after them, love to have on their chimney-places and their drinking-cups, their dishes and flagons. The whole was burnished with gilding in many parts, and was radiant ...
— The Nuernberg Stove • Louisa de la Rame (AKA Ouida)
... opinions, but it is not practical politics which will commend itself to the ordinary Irishman. "Men," wrote Edmund Burke more than a hundred years ago, "do not live upon blotted paper; the favourable or the unfavourable mind of the rulers is of more consequence to a nation than the black letter of any statute." Irish people are not likely to fail to realise this, and the experience of the past is such as to show that remedial legislation has been powerless to stay the National demand, and concessions, so far from putting a period to the appeals of the people for the ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... possession of the secret, I sat down in a corner, and watched the process of this book manufactory. I noticed one lean, bilious-looking wight, who sought none but the most worm-eaten volumes, printed in black letter. He was evidently constructing some work of profound erudition, that would be purchased by every man who wished to be thought learned, placed upon a conspicuous shelf of his library, or laid open upon his table—but ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... distinctions of the technicalities of their craft; but, as short-sighted as the mole, they cannot look at justice. So they come to acknowledge no obligation but the legal, and know no law except what is written in Black Letter on parchment, printed in statute-books, reported in decisions; the Law written by God on the soul of man they know not, only the statute and decision bound in pale sheepskin. In the logic of legal deduction—technical inference—they ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... says it was during the performance of "Dr. Faustus," and that when the devil took flight he carried away with him the roof of the theatre. This story may be alluded to in a very curious work, entitled, "The Blacke Booke" (a proper depository), "London, printed in black letter, by T.C. for Jeffery Chorlton, 1604." "The light burning serjant Lucifer" says of one, running away through fear of fire at a brothel, "Hee had a head of hayre like one of my divells in 'Doctor Faustus,' when the olde theatre crakt and ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... Coletae vita, Paris, in 8vo, black letter, undated, leaf 8 on the reverse side. Bollandistes, Acta sanctorum, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... does not by any means convey the idea of covering sheet after sheet of paper with rapid writing. The strip of parchment was about fourteen inches by four. He laid it lengthwise before him, and the letters grew slowly on it, in the old black letter hand, which took some time to form. ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... fifty years, held the post of sexton in the church of St. Mary Redcliffe at Bristol; and at the time of which we write his uncle was sexton. In the muniment-room of the church were several coffers, containing old papers and parchments in black letter, some of which were supposed to be of value. The chests were examined by order of the vestry; the valuable papers were removed, and of the rest, as perquisites of the sexton, some fell into the hands of Chatterton's father. The boy, who had been, upon leaving ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... reference. It was taken in large part from the work of Robert Stephens, who had divided the Greek Testament into verses, ten years earlier, during a journey which he was compelled to make between Paris and Lyons. The Genevan version also abandoned the old black letter, and used the Roman type with which we are familiar. It had full notes on hard passages, which notes, as we shall see, helped to produce the King James version. The work itself was completed after the accession of Elizabeth, when most of the religious leaders had ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... scarcely ran its nine days, but there of course it raged like a fire, and no one was much surprised when the vicar resigned his living and crept away to a bed-sittingroom in Museum Street, a broken old man, to spend the brief remainder of his life among black letter texts and incunabula. He could have borne any sin in the Decalogue less hardly than a breach of the military oath. He stopped Isabel, Rowsley, Lawrence himself when they tried to plead for Val. "I am not angry," he said feebly. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... found in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England. It was printed at Naples, in the black letter, in the year 1529. How much sooner it was written does not appear. The principal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity; but the language and conduct have nothing that savours of barbarism. The ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... to remove them, Bishop Fox had them deposited in these chests, and placed in this situation. The chests are carved, gilt, and surmounted with crowns, with the names and epitaphs, in Latin verse and black letter, inscribed ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... of popular rights were rescued; great deeds of valor done. Legends were created, the legend of Leonard Wood, somewhat damaged in the last campaign, the legend of the Tennis Cabinet, with its Garfields and its Pinchots, now to be read about only in the black letter books of the early twentieth century, and the legend of Elihu Root, still supported in a measure by the evidences of his highly acute intelligence, but still like everything else of those bright ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... church is still chiefly composed of glazed tiles, "called and supposed to be Roman; though upon some of them we clearly see the hatched and other Saxon ornaments," and upon others the monosyllables HAVE MYNDE (Remember) in the black letter characters used in the fifteenth century. There are passages running round each story, and communicating with the tower; but, "with all its magnificence, the general aspect of the interior is sadly disfigured by a thick coating ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 570, October 13, 1832 • Various
... intervals in which he discovered nothing but weakness and exhaustion. But he appears to have sometimes had fits of violence and despair. It seems that he was an enthusiastic admirer of Shakespeare, and a great reader of black letter books. It may be inferred that his studies were not entirely given up during his malady; but it is a subject of great wonder and regret that the Wartons, the intimate friends both of his better and darker days, have left no particular memorials of ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... easy, however, to see that one great battleground of controversy in any suggested reforms must be the design of the type itself. Here, fortunately, the English public starts with a great advantage. We have thrown overboard our old black letter with its dazzling contrasts of shading and its fussy ornament, and therefore can begin where the Germans must some day leave off. We have no accents or other diacritical marks, and in this respect are superior to the French also. We start with a fairly ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century, printed in black letter, "broad sides," or single sheets. Wynkyn de Worde printed, in 1489, A Lytell Geste of Robin Hood, which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject. In the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellanies, called Garlands. Early in the 18th ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Psalms by Becon. In the second folio edition, 1572, are inserted, in opposite columns, "the translation according to the Ebrewe," which differs but little from the former, in Roman letter, and "the translation used in common prayer," or that of the Great Bible, printed by Whitchurch, 1553, in black letter. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.02.09 • Various
... monolith—a stele of black diorite—bearing in bas-relief a likeness of Hammurabi (the Amrephel of the Old Testament; Genesis xiv, 1), and the sixth king of the first Babylonian dynasty, who reigned about 2250 B.C.; and there is also carved upon it, in archaic script in black letter cuneiform—used long after the cursive writing was invented—the longest Babylonian record discovered to this day,—the oldest body of laws in existence and the ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... Arithmetica speculativa revisa et correcta a Petro Sanchez Ciruelo Aragonesi, black letter, elegant woodcut title-page, VERY RARE, folio. Parisiis, per Thomam Anguelast (pro Olivier ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... His strange amphibian craft, the Argonaut, about which we had been hearing so many marvels, lay off the pier at Atlantic Highlands. Before we were near enough to make out her hulk, we saw a great black letter A, framed of heavy gas-pipe, rising forty feet above the water. A flag rippled from its summit. As we drew nearer, we discovered that there really wasn't any hulk to make out—only a small oblong deck shouldering deep in the water ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, "The Lives of the Black Letter Saints." For the sake of the unecclesiastically trained it may be as well to mention that in the Calendar of the Church of England there are a number of Saints' Days; some of these are printed in red, and are Red Letter Days, for which services ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... time the names were painted on the walls near their gravestones in Black Letter. As he says, "These inscriptions be written on the walles of the chapter-house in the cloyster of Gloucester: Hic jacet Rogerus, Comes de Hereford; Ricds Strongbowe, filius Gilberti, Comitis de Pembroke; Gualterus de Lacy; Philipus de Foye Miles; Bernardus de ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... Goldsmith, the industry of Henry, the research of Turner, and the patience of Lingard. The pages of these writers, however, accurate and luminous as they generally are, as well as those of Brady, Tyrrell, Carte, Rapin, and others, not to mention those in black letter, still require correction from the "Saxon Chronicle"; without which no person, however learned, can possess anything beyond a superficial acquaintance with the elements of English History, and ...
— The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle • Unknown
... in the collection of the British Museum is marked No. 50, and is in Roman, not in black letter. It contains the usual articles of news, like the London Gazette of the present day. In that curious paper, there are news dated from Whitehall, on the 23rd July, 1588. Under the date of July 26, there is the following ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... by their author, pen in hand, until, at the end of a long succession of revisions, the pages came to be cobwebbed over with a wonderfully intricate network of blots and lines in the way of correction or of obliteration. Several of the leaves in this way, what with the black letter-press on the white paper, being scored out or interwoven with a tracery in red ink and blue ink alternately, present to view a curiously parti-coloured or tesselated appearance. As a specimen page, however, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... for a new girl! Burning the midnight oil and doing four years' work in three is supposed to dull the eye and blanch the cheek, yet Rebecca's eyes are bright and she has a rosy color! Her long braids are looped one on the other so that they make a black letter U behind, and they are tied with grand bows at the top! She is so tall that she reaches almost to my shoulder. This will never do in the world! How will Mr. Aladdin get on without his comforting little friend! ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... evening of the second day since the arrival of the black letter in London from Lymport, and the wife of the brewer and the wife of the Major sat dropping tears into one another's laps, in expectation of their sister the Countess. Mr. Andrew Cogglesby had not yet returned from his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith |
